Warning: In Game Advertising
This game features prominent in-game advertising and sponsorship, creating visual pollution.

"Hockey Super Squad" is just like it says on the box, a "free" (ad supported) 3v3 small arena cartoony ice hockey game. It's orientated around online play, and while it's incomplete, there's still players for now. However, player counts have dropped sharply to just 5% of the peak player base, with only a dozen or so people playing at any given time, this means the game is on a trajectory to failure. And that's despite being one of the better ice hockey games on Steam.

The game is still too unpolished to have launched, and the controls are terrible. Unfortunately launching PvP games in Early Access is a recipe for failure... players try out the game once, see it's a buggy train wreck, and don't come back. There goes the population... no viral population, no game. That seems to be what's happening here, too.

The cartoony mobile app style graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here.

Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're designing games for. It's the responsibility of the developer to ensure the game runs well on the platform they're selling it on, with the primary peripherals that PC gamers use.

As mentioned the game is visually polluted with advertising... that may be what mobile peasants and console gamers expect to see in games (in fact I think even console peasants are spared that kind of advertising), it's not okay on PC. We're used to either completely free products or responsibly and fairly monetised products. There's no indication whether your ad views are tracked and how much demographic information the developer is capturing about you, your gameplay experience, ad viewing time, etc, but I think you would be naive if you think they're not tracking you somehow... and this is never okay.

On top of that monetization, the developer intends to shove microtransactions into the game (cosmetics) if it ever leaves Early Access (by popular demand... which means if they think it's popular they'll do it)... but considering the poor public reception, it's likely this will not be one of the 25% of games that ever gets finished and leaves Early Access.

Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it?

Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.

Remember, if the product is free, YOU are the product. Stay safe out there.

peak hockey video game, since the NHL games haven't peaked since NHL 14

LITERALLY ZERO PLAYERS WTF IS THIS